Very simply told stories of warriors, statesmen, explorers, scientists, inventors, men and women of letters, and others. Featured are Marquette in Iowa, Penn and the Indians, Thomas Smith and the beginning of rice culture in South Carolina, Franklin and the ants, Putnam and the wolf, and dozens of other stories. Ages 7-9

156 pages

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HOW FRANKLIN FOUND OUT THINGS

FRANKLIN thought that ants know how to tell things to
one another. He thought that they talk by some kind of
signs. When an ant has found a dead fly too big for him
to drag away, he will run off and get some other ant to
help him. Franklin thought that ants have some way of
telling other ants that there is work to do.

One day he found some ants eating
molasses out of a
little jar in a closet. He shook them out. Then he tied
a string to the jar, and hung it on a nail in the
ceiling. But he had not gotten all the ants out of the
jar. One little ant liked sweet things so well that he
stayed in the jar, and kept on eating like a greedy
boy.

Ants talking (magnified)

[30] At last when this greedy ant had eaten all that he
could, he started to go home. Franklin saw him climb
over the rim of the jar. Then the ant ran down the
outside of the jar. But when he got to the bottom, he
did not find any shelf there. He went all around the
jar. There was no way to get down to the floor. The ant
ran this way and that way, but he could not get down.

An Ant's Feeler (magnified)

At last the greedy ant thought he would see if he could
go up. He climbed up the string to the ceiling. Then he
went down the wall. He came to his own hole at last, no
doubt.

After a while he got hungry again, perhaps.
[31] He thought
about that jar of sweets at the end of a string. Then
perhaps he told the other ants. Maybe he let them know
that there was a string by which they could get down to
the jar.

In about half an hour after the ant had gone up the
string, Franklin saw a swarm of ants going down the
string. They marched in a line, one after another. Soon
there were two lines of ants on the string. The ants in
one line were going down to get at the sweet food. The
ants in the other line were marching up the other side
of the string to go home. Do you think that the greedy
ant told the other ants about the jar? And did he tell
them that there was a string by which an ant could get
there? And did he tell it by
speaking, or by signs
that he made with his feelers?

If you watch two ants when they meet, you will see that
they touch their feelers together, as if they were
saying "Good morning!"

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